My Critical Race Theory Professor

           My critical race theory professor is Angela Smith, a sister from the Midwest who’s an expert in human-computer interactions (HCI) and is now a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas in Austin. Her exact title is assistant professor of social justice informatics. It was my honor to be in her first seminar at the iSchool, last semester—INF 385T Special Populations. The fact is that we never quite heard her views on critical race theory because it wasn’t on the syllabus. Even though Professor Smith was advertised before her arrival at UT as a CRT expert. 

          Nonetheless my preference now, in casual conversation, is to begin sentences, “Well, my critical race theory professor says ….” even though she didn’t say anything in that regard, it still sounds cool and might make headway with a liberal chick who you’re trying to charm, and would give state leadership a coronary if they heard you say it. In fact it would justify every fear the Board of Regents probably already has about what really goes on at this end of Guadalupe Street, at Forty Acres in Austin. And because, as the descendant of slaves in Texas, my feeling is that it’s time for a little CRT on campus even if it’s not on the syllabus. Long story short, white people including academics need to worry about Professor Smith but not for the reasons they think. You feel me?

Basically my takeaways from her class, sixteen long motherfucking weeks, not to sound ignorant, were two. In research—the readings showed, and our discussions concurred—there needs to be a greater effort to provide information on the researcher’s positionality: who he or she is, in other words, because even in the case of scientific research, who is crunching the numbers has a lot to do with what the results turn out to be. 

Takeaway #2 is also imperative and requires participatory design in the study’s architecture—especially in the case of vulnerable populations. That means not just circling back to tell the people whose data you collected what the results were, but getting the subjects of the study involved in study design in the first place. To avoid exploitation. This is a hard sell even in academia because it means taking power from researchers and giving it to the people being researched.

           If you’re wondering what is an instance of a special population—Governor Abbott would be a good example. He uses a wheelchair. Although Professor Smith didn’t speak explicitly about the governor, white people like Greg Abbott who are part of the majority demographic can also be members of special populations, as Professor Smith taught in class. Other examples that we considered included people who have regularly been screwed in the past—like Native Americans—prisoners used in research—people who have a disability, as mentioned above—and immigrants. Black people were not the focus of Professor Smith’s class, which was more about anyone who is vulnerable to researchers and to society-at-large. Democrats and Republicans were never mentioned in class or in the readings—at least not in those read by me—but the powerful and powerless were mentioned in different contexts. This couldn’t even be considered Marx Lite but there’s almost certainly someone in the State Capitol who would call Professor Smith a Commie or a terrorist. In Texas common sense need not apply. In 385-T, btw, we had Dr. Smith and eight students. Two Taiwanese chicks, one Chinese American, one tech-type originally from Nepal, two white women who were into other cultures, one Latina. Me and Dr. Smith were the only bloods. Only one male—yours truly—which made me a special population too, you know? 

My experience as a black man in America is that PhD-earning sisters like Dr. Smith can make short work of un-highly-educated brothers like me, therefore my decision early in class was to establish my own positionality. What real estate the black man decided to defend, you could call it, in an academic setting. As it turned out Dr. Smith was completely cool, there was no male-bashing, but a guy can never be too careful. Our first assignment was actually a short paper to describe our own positionality. My paper was part-territoriality—in an effort to fend off any possible feminist in class, not to repeat myself. Part of my effort in class was also to develop the “toolbox” that they keep telling us about in graduate school, that we need to get hired after we have a diploma. My positionality was like a lion defining his territory, not to sound Old School, peeing on rocks and bushes in order to let others know that this is where not to tread, as part of a psycho-social-gender dialectic. 

So, like, as defined for 385T: Growing up in a single-parent African American household of the 1960s, heavily “influenced” by my strong mother and three older sisters, sometimes by a backhand across the mouth. Attended segregated schooling. Today working in a profession—nursing—where women have been on my ass almost non-stop for a quarter-century. That is my positionality, yeah. 

Throughout the semester Professor Smith kept a poker-face. Once, answering a question that all the other students had already replied to, and parsing my response, my feeling was that Professor Smith’s bullshit meter was going off, like a bomb, as she listened to me, but she didn’t call me out. She encouraged us to speak more than her telling us what to think. You may ask what does all of this—positionality/territoriality and critical race theory—have to do with the School of Information at the flagship university in blood-red Texas? Which was a prime mover of the Confederacy and where Jim Crow has never quite died? 

Those are good questions. 

The iSchool is what was formerly the School of Library Science and while some of the students still follow a tract that will lead to work in libraries or in archives—the current curriculum is much more digital, including data sets, and even programming. A Taiwanese chick told me in Starbucks one day, like a couple of years before my application to the program, that a lot of foreign-bred Asian kids apply to the iSchool at UT because they think it’s computer science. Which it is not, although it’s getting closer. A.I. for Health Care was one of my earlier classes, taught by Professor Ying Ding who is from Beijing and is one of the best instructors in my entire history of public education, since 1960. Another class was Data Storytelling which was problematic but useful. Everything regarding information is being redefined, including the definition of information itself. That is where critical race theory and Professor Smith come in. 

During the first semester my instructor for Principles of information, which is the single required course in the master’s program—the other ten or so all electives—he told us there is still a lot of debate among informaticists about even a definition of the word “information,” which is not a good sign for my new career. This guy said that by the time we graduate we should have developed a definition of our own—not one that will satisfy other informaticists everywhere, but to satisfy ourselves. This is the beginning of my last semester and a definition of information still eludes me, as we look toward the iSchool exit. My inclination is to borrow from thermodynamics and say that information involves a change in state. Something was something and becomes something else and the difference between the two states is information. Not all the details on my theory have been worked out. A more practical plan is to use my degree to help sort out some of the data tsunami from the pandemic. Critical race theory is important to me not to beat white people over the head, although that can be fun. Overall, my view is that racism is kind of a losing proposition for whites as well as for blacks. It’s kind of like being on a treadmill that you can never get off. 

Nonetheless many American public libraries have collections that are skewed by centuries of white ethno-centricity and that still need to be addressed and where else to do that than in the former School of Library Science? White writers, white editors, white professors—not to forget Ms. Jones, the nice white lady who chose books for us when we were kids and set up expositions in the local library for so many years. All these people made a lot of mistakes. Based upon their unexamined positionality. That would be my whole critical thesis, you feel me? 

My sense of Professor Smith—although we have not discussed her views on CRT—is that she is less concerned about the past and more concerned about the future, especially regarding human computer interactions, which is her thing. We spent a lot of time in class going over bad A.I. algorithms, for example, that can be just as racist as Huck Finn but more pertinent than the trip down the river, at least to me. Angela Smith’s bio page at Northwestern University, btw, whence she came, when they were asking her what books are at her bedside, lists The Wonder Weeks by Frans X. Plooij and Hetty van de Rijt; Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life edited by Ruha Benjamin, How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin; Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock; She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Joan Morgan. If you can’t even understand the title, that must be some high-level shit. 

Take note that there’s no Autobiography of Malcolm X or The Color Purple to make the Lieutenant Governor of Texas lose his lunch. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, btw, was actually written by Alex Haley, btw, who also wrote Roots and kind of started the ball rolling that led to critical race theory, in my humble view, although Roots was fiction or fictional. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a great book in the same way that Malcolm X was a great man but you don’t see it as much on campuses and in libraries—as a foundational work of American literature, which it is. Unlike To Kill a Mockingbird which is everywhere all the time because white professors and white librarians and white readers like it. 

To Kill a Mockingbird is a white savior novel, which is kind of a bullshit genre, actually, that still sells a lot of books. That’s CRT, probably, although we didn’t go into that in class either, only bad A.I. and bad participatory design.

The School of Information needs a little CRT of its own, actually, because its record on diversity is horrible. If you look on the University of Texas’s diversity website, the demographics for the iSchool are worse than anywhere else on campus except the medical school, which is run like a plantation. Overall, on campus, blacks represent one-half of one percent of instructors and one-half of one percent of students. In the iSchool there are like 9 blacks total out of about 350 students and my personal experience is, during both of my first two semesters here, of being followed into the building and asked to show identification to establish my right to be there, when Asian and whites were coming and going at will. When will we be free? My programming instructor, who is a white Southerner, has practiced microaggressions in our interactions outside class. Among iSchool faculty there are now two blacks, Dr. Smith and another female tenure-track assistant professor, and a handful of Asian women, which is good because the Asian women and the sisters know their business. Or they wouldn’t be there. Although you can’t always say that about white people, because privilege has influenced their success, as part of a critical race dialectic and seen through an equity lens. 

Among the students two-thirds are female, mostly white or Asian. The high number of foreign (primarily Pacific Rim) students is good, actually, in a different kind of race dialectic, because they’re great students—which helps to improve the games of American students. Even a bad Chinese student is better than a good American one—and they pay higher tuitions—which is important to the university, in effect subsidizing the rest of us. What’s missing from the iSchool and universities across the country now are men and specifically men of color. But that lesson has yet to be learned at UT, although we have a new president and a new provost who appear to be prioritizing change. The iSchool dean btw is a research guy named Eric Meyer who came to us from Oxford and who has had the job for three years which is long enough to have done better but he did hire the excellent Professor Smith. Even knowing what her theory was and that it is controversial in a Southern state, which is a very good thing. You may say, well, the only reason you’re praising Dr. Smith is because she’s black but that’s not true. It’s not about skin color. It’s about adherence to a revolutionary dialectic, which has been around a long, long time.

During breaks in class, or when we were arriving and settling in—as one of the only two Negroes present—my remarks to her were, like, what did she think about so-and-so—Dave Chappelle being an ass, for example—or the latest voting outrage coming out of the Capitol. She never answered. It wasn’t me trying to set her up, either. 

Three hours a week for sixteen weeks, that’s a long time in the Year of the Plague, there are breaks, there was chit chat but not much. It didn’t seem like she was being coy, either. Or that she was trying to be politically astute in order to avoid problems later, when her tenure vote comes up for example. She was just focused, and reserved. In fact we students were told nothing about her personally, except that she has a little boy and she considers Austin hot compared to wherever she came from. Her page at Northwestern says that Professor Smith’s profile became more prominent based upon a paper that she and colleagues wrote, called “Critical Race Theory in Human Computer Interactions.” Which is how academia works, one supposes, you write something timely or astute and people start to pay attention. My point would be that Professor Smith is potentially dangerous to white privilege, as a revolutionary might say, not because she’s spouting dogma, but because she has judgment and knows—not just what to say—but when not to speak. 

When it’s not on the syllabus or she hasn’t seen the data. 

These PhD-holding sisters are very impressive and enormously useful to African American liberation, as long as you can get them pointed in the right direction, which is in any direction away from studying black men. She gets my tenure vote, therefore, not that anyone has asked. 

And the positionality thing—that could be invaluable. 

You could be at a party, for example, if people after COVID go back to being socially intime, and somebody is being completely clueless or talking about shit of which they clearly have not the least fucking idea. Or they’re hiding their own personal interest in the subject, because a declaration of positionality works for undisclosed self-interest too. You know what you do? You turn to him or her—even if he or she is not talking directly to you, and you say, really casually, “So, what’s your positionality?” 

The words come out, in translation, do you know what you’re talking about or are you hiding some critical conflict that influences your opinion? Many times it shuts his or her shit down right there. That was a big takeaway for me from Informatics 385T, taught by Professor Angela Smith, in the Fall Semester of 2021, in the second year of The Plague.             

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner at Governor Abbott's House

           Guess who’s coming to dinner at the Governor’s Mansion. That’s all you can do—guess—because Governor Abbott refuses to respond to open records requests about his visitors, for dinner or for sleepovers, even though the food and electricity are provided by taxpayers. And even though his predecessors have recognized the request as legitimate and released the information in the past. As he prepares to run for the White House, our governor is reluctant to disclose who he’s seeing away from the office, across the street at the official residence, understandably. Although he was like that before too. A request three years ago for the very same information of who’s coming to the Mansion, also during Greg Abbott’s residence there, led to release of a list of names of hundreds of individuals who had toured the Mansion—even though that was not what was asked for. This time, nada. As in nothing. This time the course of this information request through his General Counsel’s office is interesting because it tells us something about the governor and who he is breaking bread with and why.

Speaking of the Governor’s Mansion. Back in the day by the way—this is so, like, not shameless gossip, not mere grist for the rumor mill in the State Capitol. 

Before the millennium, before Y2K, during the tenure of Governor George W. Bush, the guest list came back from the Mansion and the only name of the dinner invitees that was surprising to my innocent eyes—among the Bush clan and proto-Bushites and wannabe Bushes who were visiting the future President and come to kiss his ring—was Rich Oppel, then editor of the Austin daily newspaper. To set the scene. 

This was well into W’s governorship, by the way, when he had already signed off on a hundred or so executions and had cut social services in state government—to polish his conservative credentials. And Oppel seeing the governor privately when the newspaper was criticizing him publicly, or not—isn’t that, like—isn’t that dining with the enemy? 

Or schmoozing with the enemy? At least Rich Oppel wasn’t sleeping with the enemy because his name did not appear among the guests who spent the night, at the time of my records request. So, like, you aren’t going to believe this. What you’re about to hear will sound completely far-fetched and mind-blowing in the extreme. But it was a different age, remember that. Among the documentation related to housekeeping accounts and work done at the Governor’s Mansion that was released by W’s lawyers was a short memo. It seemed that, during the Bush Family’s tenure in the Big House, there was a guest who slipped in and spent a night in the Mansion without Governor Bush’s knowledge or approval. 

Recall that W had twin daughters attending Austin High School, at the time, Jenna and Barbara, both wonderful young women, good students too, who also enjoyed a margarita or three and were soon to be sweethearts of Sigma Chi or whatever? To set the scene again. 

This was, to repeat, just before the millennium. This is my memory of the affair. There was a memo in some of the documentation that was released, by Governor Bush lo a quarter century or more ago, written by Mansion staff who were pissed off, actually, because unbeknownst to staff or security, or apparently the Governor and First Lady either, a teenaged boy, also from Austin High, spent the night in the Mansion and the staff only heard about it after the fact. You can call the episode, “Jenna’s Excellent Sleepover” or “Barbara’s Best Night In,” depending upon your suspicions, because the memo did not identify whom the young man was visiting. And at the time it seemed to me that this was a private matter, not mere grist for the Capitol’s deplorable gossip mill, although it was a close call at the time. 

But with Governor Abbott, nothing like that could happen, no unwanted guests, because security practically has searchlights and machinegun towers around the Mansion. 

Besides if there’s an indiscretion this time, it’s financial not an affair of the heart or a tryst for young lovers. If you’re thinking that Governor Abbott does not want to reveal his guests at the Mansion (the equivalent of the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom is the Sam Houston Bedroom in Austin) because they include rightwing politicians or nutjobs—the Governor had lunch with the Proud Boys or whoever—the Grand Dragon slept there. The kind of people Greg Abbott needs to be seen with publicly in order to burnish conservative credentials. Former President Trump has been here and done that with the Governor already. There is a hint from the general counsel’s most recent missive of what concerns the governor regarding releasing his guest list. It’s not political. It's financial.

My request was made almost exactly two months ago. The governor’s response was that fulfilling the search and providing the list of names would require staff time amounting to $225.90, which sounded reasonable. Any request on my part for a media discount, which the law allows, or a cheaper means of disclosure, which the law also allows for—the letter from the governor said explicitly that neither of those options would be possible in this case. A big bill is not a particularly original ploy to avoid disclosure, but fulfilling public information requests does take time and charging money seems fair. Usually a bill of this magnitude works like a charm with me personally and scares me off but, for a reason that remains unclear—even to me—my decision was to pay my money and takes my chances. Although $225 is a lot of money in my world. 

There are two governor’s offices in Austin, both on the Capitol grounds, the second on the eastside, home to the big guy’s lawyers. 

Trekking there to pay for disclosure of the guest list, which now had the significance of a state secret, me passing state troopers with automatic weapons mounting a non-static defense of the State Capitol grounds—no fixed posts and the lawdogs moving unexpectedly, in cars and on foot, which can be a worrisome sight for black men. Especially when the state troopers are all white.

The governor’s office accepted my check and acknowledged same through email and cashed it a few days later. Two hundred and twenty-five dollars and ninety cents, not to repeat myself, a lot of money to me, not to repeat myself again. So, like, imagine my surprise—again, a couple of weeks after Greg Abbott banked my check. Another letter arrived from his general counsel saying the governor would not release the list of names of people who have been to the Mansion without first receiving permission from me to redact names at the governor's discretion. Or his lawyers would seek an attorney general’s ruling, which the Texas Public Information Act does permit, within ten days not two months later. Be that as it may. Specifically the letter mentioned that Governor Abbott would like to redact names for two reasons, security being one—which was bullshit, since my original request was for guests not bodyguards. And for commercial reasons. That is what the letter said and that is what apparently really worries Greg Abbott. Who the Office of the Governor of Texas is doing business with. And in that regard, in this instance, regarding who has been visiting the Abbotts at the Mansion. 

There is a change in the usual dynamic of a powerful politician not wanting to reveal his or her guests, for fear of embarrassing the politician. In this instance it’s apparently for fear of embarrassing businesspeople socializing with this governor right now. 

Right off, three names come to mind as certainties for people who have been to the Governor’s Mansion recently and probably don’t want it known, whether they’ve done a sleepover or not. Elon Musk of Tesla fame and Space X fortune for sure is one. During the early bad reaction to the latest anti-abortion legislation, not to mention the new voting restrictions which were also laid down, and which will disenfranchise minorities, uneasiness has also been reported among some businesspeople, especially those with plans to move to Texas. The world’s richest man refused to criticize the abortion law or the governor in this regard—Musk saying that he’s “not political,” words to that effect. But visiting the Mansion or being known to have visited the Mansion is something else.

Let's see. Another very likely guest is Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest person. Amazon has huge interests in the Lone Star State and Bezos grew up in South Texas and the probability is very good that he has had a drink, or two, or a meal with the governor, whoever that governor may be. #3, and this is another absolute certainty—Michael Dell, of Dell Computers, who is said to be two steps to the right of Attila the Hun’s grandmother and who has had a close working relationship with both the prior Republican governors, W and Rick Perry. 

Michael Dell is merely the world’s 25^th richest person, a pauper compared to Musk or Bezos, and for Dell the connection to the governor of Texas has historically been very important commercially. Dell Computers was built in part on State of Texas business, when Bush was governor, and W himself has said that Michael Dell liked to come by the State Capitol to show the Governor Bush how to work his PC. Michael Dell likely knows Greg Abbott well enough to stop by with takeout. 

On the political front, on the same logic, not wanting to be seen with the governor right now, there is Chief Justice Nathan Hecht and the guys and girls on the Texas Supreme Court, where Greg Abbott served for five years, btw. Supreme Court justices and powerful politicians socialize all the time, including at the White House, but Governor Abbott’s recent political activity seems to be under constant appeal to the state’s highest court and the idea that Governor Abbott is dining with or having drinks with the people deciding those cases, in cozy evenings at the Mansion, would not look good and would lead people to believe the governor and the justices discuss cases, which they almost certainly do and probably always have done, in every state and in D.C. Mostly though, as in everything else at the Texas Capitol, it's about money. 

The commercial interests that the governor cited in his letter involve flows of money that go both ways. Greg Abbott is looking for political contributions but he also gives away a lot of state money, which has been problematic in the past. 

Governor Abbott’s predecessor Rick Perry was in constant hot water regarding dispersals from the state’s Emerging Technology Fund. Greg Abbott disbanded that high tech moneypot but he still makes loans/grants for business development, through almost a dozen different programs, including one for spaceport development. The governor’s press office refuses to say who is getting state dollars as incentives and it’s hard to imagine that Elon Musk needs money from the State of Texas, but you can’t find out for sure because Greg Abbott is not telling, just like he's not saying who's coming to dinner at the Mansion. You have to guess. Maybe the real issue is not money or politics but transparency? Is that possible? No recent governor has been worse in that regard than Greg Abbott is now. 

A requestor can sue but that is expensive and time-consuming (and the case may end up with Chief Justice Hecht and his colleagues, which is another reason to want to know who’s hanging out with Greg at the Mansion.) There's a criminal provision in the open records law, actually, which led to an interesting exchange recently with a local prosecutor who would have jurisdiction, Travis County Attorney Delia Garza. Her office wouldn’t even listen to a complaint about the governor’s compliance with the Texas Public Information Act and her staff told me to take the matter to the Austin police or to the Sheriff. Does that mean flag down a patrol car? 

What goes unsaid here is that violating transparency laws is in every political leader’s best interests. Ms. Garza was until this year a member of the Austin City Council, the only people with a worse history of open government than Governor Abbott. Last year, months into the pandemic, Austin’s City Attorney answered an open records request for Mayor Steve Adler’s email on COVID-19 by saying that no documentation exists. That he had, in other words, written no messages on the subject. 

There are, basically, two ways to thwart open records requests in Texas. A politician or political entity can lie and say no documentation exists, like the City of Austin, or tell the truth and refuse to give it up anyway, like Greg Abbott. Somehow Governor Abbott’s approach seems more honest. 

         

The Nightingale Project

         

             

             Clay Johnston is a businessman and physician and was the first dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, the position from which he retired a few weeks ago. The custom of heaping praise on a departing high-ranking academic can be skipped entirely in Dr. Johnston’s case, if you’re a member of a minority group in Texas—because outcomes have not been good. 

            When Dean Johnston started out he made no promises in that regard, actually. In an interview as he took the position of Dell dean five years ago, Dr. Johnston refused to be held to any firm numbers regarding diversity in the student body. And a good thing too, because he did a poor job on this crucial front of minority access to health care, on both ends, as patients and as practitioners. He and his right hand Vice Dean Mini Kahlon have been absolutely M.I.A. on race during their tenure in Austin. At the conclusion of last semester the Dell website announced that the proportion of minorities in class was 17 percent. In a state that is more than half black and brown. Shame, and shame again.

Interestingly, however, at the time of the interview when Dr. Johnston refused to commit, so to speak, lo those five years ago, he criticized the diversity profile of the institution he had just left, the University of California San Francisco, the most prominent health-related public university in the world. “I’m certainly not going to defend UCSF and its track record,” he said, rather huffily, at the time of is hiring at UT. “We both know it needs to be better.” It is better, actually—better than Dell’s. 

Dean Johnston promised to create in Austin a new and fairer way of choosing students—through greater emphasis on interviews and on non-traditional backgrounds. That hasn’t happened. Upper middle-class white male has long been the norm in American medical schools, previously it was white guys but now at Dell it’s a lot of white girls. As incoming dean, Dr. Johnston also promised to evaluate potential students’ problem-solving skills instead of relying merely on test scores and grades. But the faculty members who judge the students for admission are still white, as is two-thirds of Dell faculty (black and brown faculty membership is 12 percent), including a key administrator who is a white South African physician, an odd choice to assure increased diversity for blacks and Latinos in health care in the Lone Star State. That means the same old outcomes are achieved as previously, or worse. 

Of Dell Medical School’s 14 department chairs, under the good Dr. Johnston, 11 are white and three are Asian, again in a state that is more than half black and Latino and, the U.S. Census just reported, is getting blacker and browner every day. The context of Dr. Johnston’s time at Dell has to be considered as well, if one is interested in these poor outcomes for minorities in admissions. He came on board (as dean and as UT vice president of medical affairs, at a salary of $750,000 a year) at a time when the university was reeling from an admissions scandal, an issue that may be particularly pertinent here. The then-university president was found to have offered places to unworthy undergraduates who were politically-connected to Texas elites.

A second admissions scandal erupted three years into Dean Johnston’s tenure—code-named “Operation Varsity Blues” by the FBI—involving eight major higher education institutions, across the country, including UT but not the medical school. A corollary question arises therefore, given this history, and given what should be higher numbers of minorities at Dell Medical School. What are the chances that these very prestigious and very sought-after places, at Dell Med, have been awarded in some cases to the well-connected, as has happened in the past at UT and at UCSF also, btw, whence Dean Johnston came? It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Considering the university’s non-diverse past, you might say. 

Although former Dean Johnston criticized his ex-employer the University of California, a lot of faculty at Dell are actually ex-UCSF, including the above mentioned Associate Dean Kahlon. Before and during the pandemic there’s been an exodus from San Francisco to Austin and also from UCSF to Dell. The danger here is that while people flow from the University of California, so does the culture in Baghdad by the Bay, which is not good. An NPR report recently quoted a former UCSF medical student saying that he was still hearing black patients referred to as niggers on rounds there just a few years ago. There’s also a lot of UC propaganda in cyberspace, which is a sign that administrators know there’s a problem but are trying to hide it. For example the University of California’s common practice is to show photos of happy-looking isolated black students on its website, to make the student body appear more diverse than it really is—a practice that has been adopted wholeheartedly by Dell. Bad behavior has flowed from Texas to the Bay Area also. UC System’s Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, Dr. John Stobo was fired for sexual harassment of an assistant just last year. He arrived at UC from UT Medical Branch on Galveston Island where he was president (John Stobo’s signature is on my nursing diploma from Medical Branch, btw, for the record.) And then there’s Dr. Johnston himself, who has shown a particular talent for ethical not sexual compromise.

While still at UCSF, the Dell ex-dean authored a paper arguing the novel position that prices for medicines are not high enough and he co-authored another in which he bemoaned conflict of interest accusations against medical researchers. 

That is Dr. Johnston's legacy, you could call it, at the University of California San Francisco. His favorite business case, btw, when he's presenting papers or giving talks, is the growth of the American railroad industry, back in the day, during the Industrial Revolution or whenever, and he likens that history to American medicine today. Here in the Live Music Capital of the World, among his first efforts was the unsuccessful attempt to lure pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to the city in order to harvest healthcare data from minorities.

Traditionally one of the biggest holes in Big Pharma’s data resources involves blacks, Latinos and Asians, while whites are overrepresented. To design treatments and meds, companies like Pfizer need as much representative data as possible, and that means minorities need to be in the mix. And it is there that Dean Johnston’s reputation and his legacy at Dell Medical School may have just been rescued by history. Pfizer took a lot of heat and eventually dropped plans for a hub here but was soon replaced in the enterprise by Google Health and its Nightingale Project. With an assist by Dell Medical School and the good Dr. Johnston, who has done what he was brought in to do, basically, to create a Big Medicine-UT axis, which may help to save all of our lives one day, actually, whether Dean Johnston is a good guy or not. 

He was brought in to do a job—to establish the university’s business ties with Big Pharma or Google, or whoever, as the case may be, like back in the day with the railroads and the Robber Barons and all that—and let’s all hope he got it right. 

Specifically, Dell Medical School and its partner Ascension Seton, which is a Catholic non-profit and operates a dozen hospitals in the Austin area, have teamed up with Google to transfer information on patients. Everything from zip code to hemoglobin level, for Big Data analysis. Before the pandemic this agreement was made public—revealed by the Wall Street Journal just before Covid broke out, to widespread horror on the part of privacy activists. This Big Data agreement was considered yet another Big Tech invasion and an attempt to profit from patient information. Which it was, in another era. But since the pandemic the ground has shifted under everyone’s feet. As we enter the second wave of Covid-19, one can only hope that data is flowing like the Mississippi, from hospitals and labs. The danger of the dreaded Big Tech-Big Medicine hookup, facilitated by academics like Clay Johnston—the Nightingale Project, as the endeavor is called by Google, or by any other name—pales in comparison to the danger of the next virus, which could feature a more virulent strain or a faster-moving outbreak. Big Pharma (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and others, companies synonymous with the vaccine makers) have actually performed well in the COVID-19 crisis. You have to give the devil his or her due.

A lecture delivered last semester at UT by a Big Pharma scientist revealed that the Moderna vaccine was designed in a day-and-a-half—with the succeeding months, before rollout, spent on testing, production, and regulatory approval. The Nightingale Project preceded the pandemic, and was a bad idea then, but it’s a great one now, hopefully Dr. Johnston took care of business, like the professional he is. There is a risk that Google or whoever will become even more powerful, through access to raw patient data, much of it from minorities—who are being denied access to seats in the Dell Medical School, by the way, not that there's anything wrong with that. But that risk can be lessened by de-identifying healthcare data and making it a public good, free to everyone. The fear of medical data release—like the fear of masking and of vaccination—is real and may be just as deadly. 

Throwing out DaBaby with da Bath Water

             

        What about Eric Clapton? That would probably be DaBaby’s question if anyone asked. DaBaby—a rap artist whose music is happily unknown to me—was cancelled last week, literally, when concert impresarios C3 Presents struck his name from the famed Austin City Limits festival in October. Stop me if you’ve heard this before—for homophobic and highly ignorant comments. And justifiably so. But Eric Clapton who is white and is rock ‘n roll royalty has said a lot worse and will still be performing in Austin this September at the University of Texas Special Events Center. There’s been no call to cancel his visit, by promoters or by fans. In fact a good argument can be made that Clapton’s comments (“Stop Britain from being a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white . . . .”, hmmm), which led to the Rock Against Racism movement, actually, are worse, because they were directed against the very black people to whom Eric Clapton owes his music. There’s a silver lining to this episode, however, because DaBaby's time-out presents such a rich environment for puns—and also shines a long overdue light on the murky world of concert promotion in Austin, Texas, the World Capital of Live Music.

        C3 Presents is da baby of Charlie Jones, Charles Attal and Charlie Walker—the 3 original C’s—and was born in this burgeoning River City fifteen years ago. An early backer of the company was said to be cyclist Lance Armstrong. His longtime agent, Bill Stapleton, who is a former Longhorn swimmer and Olympian is somewhere in the early C3 mix too. Connection to Lance Armstrong is not necessarily a good thing, considering the famed athlete’s recent troubles, but we won’t get into that here. Indeed C3 has some very impressive credentials. Because the company also puts on the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, and came to the attention of the Obama clan, C3 was picked later to put on events at the White House. My source who has worked as a contractor for C3 said regarding the company’s use by President Obama, “They did everything for him from rallies to his acceptance speech in Grant Park and Easter egg hunts at the White House.” C3 is described as highly non-diverse (and declined to respond with its minority employment breakdown.) What’s interesting is that the company that cancelled DaBaby—and rightfully so—and also puts on a lot of shows in casinos—was bought out by Live Nation which previously merged with Ticketmaster. (It was the Obama administration, btw, that allowed Live Nation to take over C3, despite antitrust fears.) Live Nation’s former chairman is music mogul Irving Azoff, the former manager of the supergroup The Eagles. Azoff is also former CEO of Ticketmaster, and is founder, together with Tim Leiweke, former CEO of AEG—the largest sports promoter in the world—of “Oak View Group” which together with Live Nation has a $338 million contract to build and manage the new Moody Center in Austin to replace the old University of Texas Special Events Center where Eric Clapton will play next month. If it sounds like a small world, it is, and it gets smaller. The Moody Center will be home of Longhorn men and women’s basketball and music events. Enter Matthew McConaughey. Per Musicrow.com: “McConaughey, University of Texas at Austin professor, Distinguished Alumnus (BS ’93) and Academy Award-winning actor, has signed on as Minister of Culture of the Moody Center and will work on ideas including but not limited to suite designs, bar placement, color schemes, and other concepts, to create a symbiotic relationship between the arena, the city, and the university.” You couldn’t make this up.

        In addition C3 Presents has the contract for the Moody Amphitheater in the newly reopened Waterloo Park, smack center of downtown Austin, a couple of blocks from Irving Azoff’s new special events center on campus and a stone’s throw from the state Capitol and Greg Abbott’s crib. If the governor opens his windows he can probably hear the music. Interesting that these deals, which have led to Mr. Azoff becoming the single most important guy in music in Austin, in a very short time, through public-private partnerships, were done without apparent bidding or public scrutiny? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Mayor Steve Adler who will soon preside over the reopening of Waterloo Park has declined requests to explain what the public is getting out of all these music industry machinations. It’s like the privatization scandals of a prior Republican era, except instead of prisons it’s music. This template (creation of a new music venue at a public park, and handing over management of the venue to a non-profit that does not have to explain its contracting process or answer open records requests) will soon be applied to Zilker Park too, home of Barton Springs. That is corruption City of Austin style. The UT deal was executed, btw, by former university President Greg Fenves, in consultation with Mayor Adler, among others.

        However everything shakes out, this is likely to be a big payday and another increase in power for Irving Azoff who is a legend in the music business and who has also been accused of a monopoly-like control in the industry in the past. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, either. (Mr. Azoff would not comment.) The music industry may have made the correct call with DaBaby but it’s weird that what is right or wrong or not permissible, regarding race or culture, in live music in Waterloo Park is now in the hands of a bunch of white guys, mostly living in L.A., who have made no effort to diversify a very Caucasian group of music industry businesses. Back to DaBaby, who is presently in time-out. It’s been noted elsewhere that his recent gay-bashing was not his first offense and that the LGBTQ community is trying to make a stand against longtime prejudice in the music industry. How gays do that is a gay rights call and should be supported by the black community, because it ill-behooves blacks to complain about use of a social revolt playbook that we wrote. You feel me? What one would like however is more consistency in how sanctions are applied. 

        Unfortunately, Eric Clapton may not be the best artist to start with. First, his comments were made almost half a century ago, during a time in which he has described himself as “semi-racist,” whatever that means. Even if you drop the semi—and add his recent anti-vaccination comments, he is simply, on one level, an unrepentant old white guy, age 76, who happens to be a CBE, courtesy of Her Majesty the Queen who is also dotty. Be that as it may. As for DaBaby, he needs a spanking now—that’s the best argument—while it may have an effect on future behavior. Which is unlikely to be the case with Clapton. Now we can address the real determinant of forgiveness and punishment in the culture wars, Eric Clapton’s artistry. “Layla,” “Cocaine,” “Lay Down Sally,” the Yardbirds, Cream, Derek and the Dominoes among his former associations. DaBaby may have a biography like that too one day but Eric Clapton already does. This is Slowhand himself, people. There are fans who would push their own grandmother out of the way to get the ticket. He’s not God but he plays electric guitar like Him or Her. Anybody who can see Clapton play now—live—should.